Edgar Wright on Ghosts, Musicals, and Last Night in Soho – Den of Geek

In Last Night in Soho, audiences follow Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a young woman who has come to London with starry eyes for what the big city was like back in the day. Unfortunately, her reveries take a more insidious turn once she actually travels to the tumultuous ’60s decade, shadowing a mysterious lounge singer (Anya Taylor-Joy) toward dark places.

Looking back now, Wright is swept up in the excitement he found in  shutting down whole streets and redressing them like their seedier glory days while Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith zip by in mod attire. He’s also haunted by the evenings when he found the courage to return there during lockdown, becoming affected by the sudden silence of the district and memories of friends who were recently lost, including ’60s luminary Dame Diana Rigg.

“It was completely and utterly deserted, which added an extra poignancy to it,” Wright says. “And there’s another separate part of it that’s bittersweet and elegiac in a way. Soho is rapidly changing. Some of those buildings with ghosts in them, they’re just going forever, which is very sad.” Clearly such spirits walk beside Wright, be it in his wistful comedies or serious ghost stories. Below is our conversation, edited for length and clarity, about those shades.

In Last Night in Soho, a character says, “This is London. Someone’s died in every room and on every street corner.” Is that something you think about when you’re walking around town?

Oh, my God! I mean that character says it because I believe it. This specifically is to say there are buildings in London that are hundreds of years old, of which most of Soho is like. That’s the thing that inspired the movie, really. I’ve been in London for 25 years. I’ve spent most of that time working in Soho. I’ve probably spent more time in Soho than I have in some couches in flats that I’ve been in. Because I’ve written there, I’ve edited movies there. Nearly all of the movies I’ve done, even the American and Canadian ones, have been edited in Soho. I’ve just spent an enormous amount of time there. It’s also an entertainment district, so there’s restaurants and bars, and cinemas. 

But it’s also that thing where, even now, it is on the border of a darker side of the underworld, which is still there in contemporary Soho in plain sight. And then going back, when I first moved to London, that side of life was a lot more prevalent, and then if you go back to the ‘60s, even more so. It’s not necessarily always a great place to be, and I guess that’s the point of the movie: that there is a danger of romanticizing the past, and obviously the ‘60s is a decade to get totally obsessed with, and I certainly am in terms of having grown up with my parents’ record collection, which was predominantly ‘60s records.

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